The Onion Domehttps://oniondome.wordpress.com
Life in 21st Century RussiaThu, 31 Aug 2017 06:58:52 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/dac2e03b0a4ae3eb3012348e1bcccc0a?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngThe Onion Domehttps://oniondome.wordpress.com
Tovarishch Trump?https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/tovarishch-trump/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/tovarishch-trump/#respondFri, 18 Nov 2016 00:05:42 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1680Continue reading →]]>What does the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States mean for US-Russian relations?

As of November 2016, the best answer may be that it is too soon to tell. This is despite Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Ryabkov’s disclosure that there had been contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign prior to the election, seeming to confirm theories that the Trump phenomenon was masterminded from Moscow. After all, Trump’s ties to Russia were too blatant to ignore: there was the appearance on Russia Today, speculation as to the origin story of Carter Page, and even an amusingly hopeful tweet from 2013.

If the Trump-Putin bromance had been written by Hollywood, the big reveal would be that glamorous Melania was in fact a KGB sleeper cell, to be activated after The Donald takes the oath of office on January 20, 2017.

But as is the nature of this blog, rather than look deeply at Trump and the American election, we will try first to better understand the Kremlin’s approach to Trump from a Russian perspective.

To start, let us allow that the Kremlin certainly preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton. Russian state-run media leading up to the election consistently lambasted Clinton, and were very overt in promulgating the leaked DNC emails posted on Wikileaks, which damaged the Clinton campaign. This is a clear choice – equally damning emails from the Trump campaign surely could be found by the Kremlin’s army of cyber soldiers.

So the question becomes “why” would the Kremlin prefer Trump?

First, the preference for Trump can be placed in the broader context of a wave of a electoral victories for candidates perceived to be close to the Kremlin. This is extremely topical, as just this week Bulgaria and Moldova saw victories of their own Russian-leaning politicians.

Second, to put a spin on this, we could posit that Russia’s electoral interference in general has one of two political objectives, either:

(1) To ensure the victory of a satrap who can be controlled by the Kremlin (the classic example of this is the former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, but it could be extended to Moldova, Georgia, etc); OR

(2) To create conditions that ensure that an independent political actor is unable to pursue their own strategic objectives. This is called ‘destabilizatsiya‘ and could accurately describe the prevailing status quo in Ukraine and would certainly apply if Hillary Clinton had won – a divided electorate, burgeoning public dissent as a result of email leaks, and ongoing provocations threatening hapless allies.

As Russian government officials have walked back Ryabkov’s comments, it increasingly appears as though their expected outcome in the US election was (2) (however pursued).

But now that Trump won the election, it is unclear whether a Trump foreign policy would bring Russia any closer to achieving its main foreign policy objectives vis-a-vis the US. Those objectives remain as before:

(1) Removal of economic sanctions

(2) Recognition of the annexation of Crimea

(3) Acquiescence to a cease-fire in Syria favoring Bashar al-Assad

There is a fourth objective often mentioned on Russia Today that Russia would like Julian Assange freed.

With a Trump Presidency, the vehicle to achieve these three has been dubbed “Yalta 2.0”, an unlikely grand bargain in which hypothetically a Trump-led US chooses not to honor its Article V NATO commitments.

In spite Trump’s pronouncementd, his temperament suggests that he would only ever make concessions on any of the three points above if it were in the US’ national interest (or his own personal interest). It would be foreign policy an the mold of The Art of the Deal, but what is Russia offering other than US disentanglement from conflicts that the Obama administration has not exactly become ‘entangled’ in?

Overall, a Russian destabilizatsiya strategy has now created a brave new world for the Kremlin. There will likely continue to be an undercurrent of ongoing cyber attacks and other disruptions, up to and including more buzzing of NATO ships in the Baltic, but I think overall Trump’s impact on US-Russian relations remains in the unopened box of unknown unknowns

]]>https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/tovarishch-trump/feed/0oniondomeAgree to disagreehttps://oniondome.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/agree-to-disagree/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/agree-to-disagree/#respondSun, 07 Jun 2015 23:59:28 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1675Continue reading →]]>A few months ago, internet top ten list assembly line WatchMojo released grist for russophiles. These lists are voted on by youtube channel subscribers, so they should be taken with a grain of salt.

really weird/pretentious list, like it was put together by someone who read a wikipedia page on Russian movies.

A few quick comments: the list is very heavy on Tarkovsky vehicles and short on sentimental favorites such as Ryazanov. Technically innovative films such as Man with a Movie Camera and Battleship Potemkin certainly belong on such a list, but surely room could have been made for Burnt by the Sun as well as movies from some of the more talented post-Soviet directors (Balabanov, Zvyagentsev). Russian Ark certainly deserves all the props it gets. It was Birdman way before Birdman.

But the beauty of the above clip can be found in the comments section, aka the Cold War Redux.

On one side we have the native Russian speakers who grew up with these films and who just cannot believe that the list left off some slapstick childhood favorites:

Oche Ubogo 3 months ago
I wonder why did you miss all the soviet comedies. There are some really brilliant ones.
Reply · 204
Wait. So I’m a Russian and I have never even heard of most of the movies on the list. You missed so many great comedies which are still popular even today. What a truly terrible list.

Surprisingly enough, there’s a distinctive absense of the great russian comedies like The Tvelve Chairs, Shurik’s Other Adventures, other works by Gaidai, The Irony of Fate and Beware of the Car by Eldar Ryazanov, which deserve at least the honourable mention. The list looks kinda grim without those in tact.

Рыжий Кролик 2 months agoWell, I’m from Russia and I’ve only watched one of the listed films..

And in the other corner we have the Americans, who link all things Russian to evil and despair:

iliph Rogers 3 months agoWhat about a top 10 movies from Nazi Germany next time? Oh wait that would not be PC. Also all these movies are boring and pretentious. Only hipsters jerk off to this shit.

Tony Ara 3 months ago
NOT THE BEST TIME TO SUPPORT A COUNTRY WHICH LEADER IS KILLING THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE RIGHT NOW!!! RIGHT THIS SECOND SOMEBODY DIES FROM BECAUSE OF PUTINS CRAZY PLANS!!!!!!

Let’s just saw that this is an area where we can all agree to disagree.

]]>https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/agree-to-disagree/feed/0oniondomeWhat is canon?https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/what-is-canon/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/what-is-canon/#respondSun, 11 Jan 2015 18:46:47 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1672Continue reading →]]>The following is a long overdue post about two OGs, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames.

Last fall, Matt Taibbi departed Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media before the launch of his much anticipated new web journal, Racket. The unexpected departure prompted rueful tweets from Taibbi:

Was Omidyar to blame, a new media oligarch with poor management skills? This would be unsurprising, as it is a theme we have seen over and over again (hi, Chris Hughes)

Was it Matt Taibbi, an abrasive celebrity journalist? Or maybe it was a little bit of both?

Then, tagging himself into the ring, Mark Ames threw his version of a haymaker: Taibbi’s pal came to his fellow The Exile alum’s defense by directly linking Omidyar to funds allocated towards alleged neo-fascists at the vanguard of Ukraine’s post-Maidan counterrevolution. Here are some money quotes:

Zalishchuk was given a choice spot on the president’s party list, at number 18, ensuring her a seat in the new Rada. And she owes her rise to power to another oligarch besides Ukraine’s president – Pierre Omidyar, whose funding with USAID helped topple the previous government

This latest twist in Omidyar Network’s murky, contradictory or two-faced roles raises more disturbing questions about what the tech billionaire is up to. On the one hand, Omidyar plays the “adversarial” watchdog of the US National Security State, having privatized Snowden’s NSA files, the largest national security secrets leak in history, for his startup publication The Intercept with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the only two people entrusted with the complete Snowden cache.

On the other hand, Omidyar and his wife have been among the most frequent visitors to the Obama White House, intermingling with members of his National Security Council and State Deptartment. Meanwhile, in just the past year Omidyar Network has co-funded Ukraine revolution groups in Ukraine with the US government, and directly financed far-right, pro-business political actors in both Ukraine and in India, where a former top figure in Omidyar Network, Jayant Sinha now serves in theultranationalist BJP Party and as close advisor to its controversial far-right leader, Narendra Modi. Previously, Sinha had served in a powerful BJP Party think-tank, the India Foundation to elect Modi, while simultaneously working as head of Omidyar Network India Advisors, and serving on the five-member global Executive Committee of Omidyar Network.

This week, Omidyar Network’s “investment lead” for Ukraine, Stephen King, accepted an award for Omidyar Network’s role in a major new USAID-backed project, Global Impact Investing Network.

There is truly nothing like Omidyar’s contradictory roles – fighting the empire, leaking the empire’s secrets, while also working hand-in-glove with the empire’s agencies to make the world more pliable to US government and corporate interests. Perhaps it reflects the multibillionaire’s bizarre Howard Hughes-like schizophrenia; perhaps it’s deliberate, a co-optation of the dissident activist wing. Perhaps there’s no rhyme or reason, only the effects – an eerie silence from nearly the entire activist community when it comes to holding Omidyar or his many endeavors accountable.

Depending on what you think of USAID, Omidyar, and Ukraine, this either represents a valiant defense of a long-time friend and colleague, or it represents baseless bloviation in bad taste.

But this post is not about First Look Media or about what happened with Racket.

It is about looking past the recent events surrounding First Look Media (and Pando) to remind readers where Ames and Taibbi belong in the canon of post-Soviet writing (hint: they are first ballot hall of famers). Because elsewhere on social media there has been an ad hominem backlash against Ames & Taibbi, especially after the Pando salvo cited above. Sifting through some of this backlash, it is easy to see where it comes from: their work on Russia is vulgar.

I am not a fanboy, but I firmly believe that the work that Taibbi and Ames did in Russia, long before Pando and First Look Media, is canon for any student of Russia. To be contemplated, critcized, and contextualized in order to understand where Russia is today.

While those of us working in Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s were maybe tangentially exposed to the filth, the misogyny, the xenophobia, and the depravity of the early- to mid- Post-Soviet years, Taibbi and Ames immersed themselves in that filth and illuminated it for those who were too blind or too spineless to admit what was going on. Give me Taibbi and Ames every time, instead of the British journalist who keeps a secret second wife and kids in Moscow, or the American banker who enriched himself by essentially stealing from the Russian people. What we see in The Exile is the ugly truth of what was happening in Russia.

He has been dying for at least twenty consecutive years now — although he only started dying physically about ten years ago, he has been dying in a moral sense since at least the mid-’80s. Of course, spiritually speaking, he’s been dead practically since birth. … I once visited Boris Yeltsin’s birthplace, in a village in the Talitsky region of the Sverdlovsk district in the Urals, a tiny outhouse of a place called Butka. I knocked on the door of the shack where Yeltsin was born and stepped in the soft ground where his room had once been. Boris Yeltsin was born in mud and raised in shit….

As a teenager he only knew two things; how to drink vodka and smash people in the face. At the very first opportunity he joined up with the communists who had liquidated his grandfather and persecuted his father and became a professional thief and face-smasher.

And, for further edification, who could forget their satirical Field Guide to Moscow (personal favorite: Trophia Minigarchia)

Their work is offensive but relevant, even today. After all, the people skewered on the pages of The Exile remain influential even today.

This is just the latest in Russia’s atavistic turn, with Putin’s 62nd birthday earlier this month offering up another example: the return of the personality cult in full force.

For a children of the corn style vibe, check out this song sung by a St. Petersburg children’s choir:

But perhaps most vivid of the celebratory outpouring was series of Herculean paintings comparing Putin’s achievements as Russian Head of State with the 12 labors of Greek legend. This spawned a rash of coverage all devoted to the exhibit and the metaphorical labors of Putin:

With the ruble falling off a cliff and the ever-increasing threat of inflation, I do not agree with Antonov that Putin’s response to western economic sanctions is the equivalent of slaying the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra.

Instead, the exile of Yeltsin-era oligarchs, from Abramovich to Berezovsky, seems more appropriate.

Am really not sure what message Antonov is sending by equating the Sochi Olympics to the Golden Hind. This one seems too easy to me: Putin captured Yukos from Golden Boy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a victory that may cost more than expected.

Instead of the fight against corruption, the day-long cleaning of the Augean stables is best represented by Putin’s decision to wait five days while on vacation in Sochi before actually doing something about the Kursk sub disaster.

Antonov uses the contract for French Mistral warships for this one (have the ships been delivered yet?). Given that this one involves stealing, it may be more appropriate to depict Putin’s expropriation of billions in ill-gotten wealth.

The South Stream pipeline (Antonov’s labour of choice) is a valid representation of a girdle. But the pipeline is far from complete, and faces significant regulatory pressure from the EU.

Instead, Putin’s efforts to reverse the Soviet geopolitical dissolution by re-integrating ex-communist states in the Eurasian Union seems more appropriate. Putin has girded Kazakhstan. Belarus and Armenia together in a customs alliance.

Here we need three heads, so we can’t use Antonov’s example of conflict with the U.S. A counter-proposal: Putin can capture and bring back Cerberus by eventually annexing the rogue states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria.

Anyway, this is the only appropriate reaction to Antonov’s work:

]]>https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/the-actual-12-labor-of-putin/feed/0oniondomeLitvinenko1634cecb3cimagesMeet: Yuri Meshkovhttps://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/meet-yuri-meshkov/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/04/06/meet-yuri-meshkov/#respondSun, 06 Apr 2014 22:42:16 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1653Continue reading →]]>A long-time listener of Mark Schauss’ Russian Rulers’ History podcast (now called Russian History Re-told), I would like to give him a shout-out for his podcast last week on Crimea.

While I disagree with his theory behind Russia’s Ukrainian incursion – he believes Putin wanted to gin up instability in order to keep oil prices high and enjoy a post-Sochi bump in government revenue – he did introduce me to Yuri Meshkov, a lesser-known figure in Ukrainian history.

Who is Yuri Meshkov?

Well, before the adoption of Ukraine’s current constitution, and before the much-discussed Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty, Yuri Meshkov was elected as the first and only President of Crimea in post-Soviet history.

Per Wikipedia, his election platform consisted of:
– Facilitating much closer relations with Russia up to the possible annexation of Crimea by Russia.
– Introducing the Russian ruble as the currency of Crimea
– Issuing Russian passports to citizens of Crimea
– Shifting Crimea to the same time zone as Moscow

The only initiative he was able to successfully implement was the shift to the Moscow time zone.

The performance is from 2013, and Putin does have a supposed affinity for rhythmic gymnasts. Check out 2:24 for the money shot.

But this reminds me just how rich Ukraine’s Got Talent is.

One of the more epic performance’s is Maxim Doshi, aka rapper Cruel Addict, who attempted to win the internet by releasing a home-made music video for his single “I Am The Best”

The music video is embedded here, for his two appearances on Ukraine’s Got Talent, click here (2010)б and here (2011)

If you are interested in learning more about the troubled Doshi, I point you to his entry in Lurkomore, the bizarre Russian combination of Urban Dictionary and Dickipedia.

Saving the best for last, though, there is Ksenia Simonova, who rendered heart-wrenching WWII images in sand in 2009, set to traditional Ukrainian music as well as Metallica for the finale.

Not a dry eye in the house starting at 5:20

]]>https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/ukraines-got-talent-%d1%83%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%b8%d0%bd%d0%b0-%d0%bc%d0%b0%d0%b5-%d1%82%d0%b0%d0%bb%d0%b0%d0%bd%d1%82/feed/1oniondomeIs Putin playing chess or checkers?https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/is-putin-playing-chess-or-checkers/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/is-putin-playing-chess-or-checkers/#commentsFri, 07 Mar 2014 06:45:11 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1630Continue reading →]]>For the past 20 years, Ukraine has been a country in transition, emerging from the Soviet rubble with an unneeded nuclear arsenal, a linguistically heterogeneous population, a crumbling economy and a semi-authoritarian political system in place, party-boss plutocracy reimagined as “democracy”.

Now the country has been invaded. The parliament of Crimea has voted to accede to Russia. After months of gripping street battles a drama is playing out in the Black Sea coast that apparently has taken much of the world by surprise.

But it was easy to see this coming. Russia has consistently pursued an activist foreign policy in its near abroad, most viscerally seen by its 2008 invasion of Georgia, ostensibly to protect ethnic Russians in South Ossetia.

The argument, the objective, and the implementation are parallel to what we see in Ukraine. They are running their playbook.

And what is their objective? Broadly speaking…

To ensure that key former Soviet states remain politically and economically aligned with Russia.

There are fill-in-the-details, like the naval base deal brokered in 2010, or the seemingly half-hearted attempt at re-integration (following the Soviet disintegration) via the Eurasian customs union.

While the Russian playbook is transparent, the grand strategy of American President Barack Obama, who has been critical of Putin’s incursion into Crimea, has been less clear. Hence the spread of witty political cartoons such as this one:

But what moves does he have? Given that…

Ukraine is in transition.

In fact, as taught in American academia, Ukraine is undergoing two transitions:

(1) Institutional transition

The country shifted from a communist regime to a country on the path to democracy (whatever that means)

(2) Geostrategic transition

Due to its geography, Ukraine has been drawn to two competing poles – Russia to the east and the EU to the west, both offering certain protections and certain constraints on Ukraine’s sovereignty.

In fact, as stated in an interview with a member of Ukraine’s Autonomous Workers Union, “objectively, the optimal scenario for the Ukrainian economy would be to continue the old policies of geopolitical “neutrality”, without decisive integration into Western or Eastern structures. Any ‘choice’ will be a severe blow to Ukrainian exports and to the well-being of the people” in order to “avoid an explosion of so many contradictions (class, national, geopolitical, economical, etc.) that intersect each other in the Ukrainian society.”

Based on my reading of world events, these two transitions, perhaps one internal and one external, have created two sharp dichotomies: will Ukraine’s political institutions become more liberal or anti-liberal? And will Ukraine maintain its territorial integrity? (note that this blog post was drafted before the Crimean referendum).

One underlying objective, preferred by realists but not yet articulated by Western leaders in the latest series of events, is stability. Stability in transitions is brought about through any number of instruments, from authoritarianism to the careful management of social expectations, or through gradual economic reform. And the fact is, compared to other former Soviet states, particularly those that experienced armed conflict, Ukraine experienced a stable transition in the first 13 years of its recent independence.

Since this time, Ukraine has been at a crossroads, and this is the first point where we can say maybe the west was playing chess not checkers, as they (naively) engaged in negotiations on an EU association agreement with President Viktor Yanukovich, no friend of the EU and a man who owed his political success to the Kremlin kingmaker.

Let’s say at this stage, based on the two transitions described above that there were four paths before Ukraine:

In November 2013 Yanukovich made a tactical decision that required a strategic response: he ‘revealed the lie‘ and abandoned negotiations with the EU on a trade and association agreement. The sparked an outbreak of street protests that he was unable to suppress, revealing a society deeply divided. He had deceived his own people, costing him political capital. And had he perhaps also deceived the EU?

At this point, Ukraine’s transitional path shifted abruptly as the carefully managed expectations gave way to rapidly growing social instability. I believe this required a strategic response by the EU. Alternately, the absence of a response showed what my intuition tells me is true: of the four scenarios outlined above, none of them fit into any strategic parameters articulated by the west. There are no nukes involved like there were in the 1990s, so we simply dont have any skin in the game. EU membership for Ukraine would be nice, but not worth going to war over.

And here is where Russia implemented its strategy by moving military units into Ukraine, committing the Crimean security services to Russian loyalty and coordinating a dubious parliamentary referendum on accession to Russia. As of this writing, I still believe the military play is largely a bluff (no shots have been fired), but the implications are strategic: Russia is protecting its long-term interests in the Black Sea and understands that its actions have possibly permanently knocked Ukraine off any path towards EU membership, certainly in the foreseeable future.

Why did they do this? Because they believe that the strategic objective is worth the cost. You may disagree with their objective, but I find it hard to disagree with their implementation of strategy. On the other hand, I have trouble seeing what the west’s objective is or even should be. Based on the ad hoc and reactionary response from the west, I think our lie – like Yanukovich’s – was revealed as well: we support Ukrainian integration with the west, so long as it does not cost us anything. We have been on a collision course with Putin’s Russia for years and do not appear to have done any contingency planning. Or we did, behind the scenes, and it has been ineffective.

So is Putin playing chess? If so, what is the west’s countermove? Nation-states come and go, and sometimes stability requires a country to split, either peacefully (Czechslovakia) or as the end point of a long period of bloodshed (Yugoslavia).

If I were a realist, I would make two conclusions:

– While Putin may still be bluffing, he is willing to threaten extreme action to protect Russian military interests in Crimea. [We will see if Putin is bluffing once violence escalates]

– If recent events have “exploded Ukraine’s internal contradictions” beyond repair, then the strategic play for the west is to move Ukraine on the path to the top left corner. That is, redoubling efforts to integrate western Ukraine with Europe.

I think this matches up with what the west has demonstrated it is willing to risk. To move a unified Ukraine back on the path to EU membership in light of the facts on the ground as of March 2014 may require more than we are willing to risk. This means that we either gravely underestimated Putin (possible), or that Ukraine’s future was never a strategic priority (more likely).

Years from now, looking back, we may remember November 2013 (and not March 2014) as a moment when the west conceded a crucial stage of a post-Soviet nation’s political and economic transition.

]]>https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/is-putin-playing-chess-or-checkers/feed/1oniondomeputin-obama-chess-vs-bingo-checkersTransitions1Transitions3Transitions4transitions6Transitions7transitions8О вкусах не спорятhttps://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/%d0%be-%d0%b2%d0%ba%d1%83%d1%81%d0%b0%d1%85-%d0%bd%d0%b5-%d1%81%d0%bf%d0%be%d1%80%d1%8f%d1%82/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/%d0%be-%d0%b2%d0%ba%d1%83%d1%81%d0%b0%d1%85-%d0%bd%d0%b5-%d1%81%d0%bf%d0%be%d1%80%d1%8f%d1%82/#respondTue, 25 Feb 2014 21:07:49 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1613Continue reading →]]>This post is not about the 2014 Winter Olympic games themselves. The exorbitant cost of the games and allegations of corruption have been well-documented, as have the moments of sporting triumph, and heartbreak.

Instead this post covers the coverage of the games by Western journalists. I think in our coverage of Sochi we learned as much about ourselves as we did about Russia, and it was at times counterproductive.

There was the twitter phenomenon of journalists posting photos of their unsatisfactory accommodations. No wifi, broken doorhandles, and failing plumbing, all presented as voyeuristic selfies. Leave it to Bill Burr to call BS on all of us (skip to the 5:22 mark for his Olympics rant):

Transcription:

All the journalists complaining that the water isn’t running and all that type of shit…am i the only guy who watched all those cold war movies when i was growing up? You know what it’s like over there…there’s 20 people who have some shit, and everyone else is getting fucked; its unbelievably corrupt.

A little later in the podcast comes a money quote about Russia’s intolerance towards gays:

How can you have the technology to blow up the world, and still not understand humanity?

Likewise, opposition leader and vocal critic of the Sochi Olympics Garry Kasparov also found the coverage of Sochi banalia tiresome:

There was a lot of mockery of the opening ceremony, and especially of the police choir singing Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’. It was kitsch.

But Putin loves kitsch. Why was the police choir invited to perform? Because Putin wanted them there! They performed the song at a November 2013 tribute event during which Vladimir Putin was overcome with emotion and actually cried! (video in the link)

The 2013 performance:

О вкусах не спорят.

It is counterproductive to bash the kitsch without understanding where it’s coming from. And, as Bill Burr implies, the ‘scandals’ that did come out of Sochi suggest that many journalists did not understand, and continued to be shocked.

This had two impacts:
– Engaging in Russia-bashing at a moment of heightened national pride actually boosted Putin’s popularity. Pictures on twitter of broken doorknobs will never induce Russians to root against their own Olympic teams (and Olympic Committee organizers). Russia was the first winter Olympics host to top the medals table since Norway in 1994.

]]>https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/russian-parenting/feed/0oniondomeanimal-children-photography-elena-shumilova-13Who won the Space Race?https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/who-won-the-space-race/
https://oniondome.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/who-won-the-space-race/#commentsWed, 23 Oct 2013 14:39:40 +0000http://oniondome.wordpress.com/?p=1602Continue reading →]]>With the success of Alfonso Cuaron’s latest film, Gravity, which features space debris from a Russian missile as a prominent plot device, I am reminded of the fierce 20th century competition between Russia and the US over the cosmos and want to ask the somewhat rhetorical question: who really won the Space Race?

Well for one, let’s acknowledge that the space race is not over (will it ever be?) and that opinions may change in the coming decades as mankind continues to explore the final frontier and gets closer to putting a human on Mars.

Second, the July 1969 breathtaking broadcast of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon is understandably considered the triumphal high point of the Cold War-era contest between the USA and the USSR.

It’s also true that the USSR never really stood a chance in the race to put a man on the Moon. Jalopnikjust released a fascinating piece explaining in detail why the Soviet Union’s kerosene-fueled N1 rocket was never able to reach the same heights as the Saturn V that launched the crew of the Apollo 11 on their historic mission.

The N1:

The N1 had four test launches, all resulting in failure:

But, courtesy of the Jalopnik commenters, let’s not forget some important milestones that the Soviet’s did reach first:

– First satellite in space (Sputnik)
– First animal in space (Laika)
– First man in space (Yuri Gagarin)
– First woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova)
– First probe to land on the Moon (Luna 2 in 1959, it crashed)
– First probe to land on the Moon and survive impact (Luna 9 in 1966)
– First rover on the Moon (Lunokhod 1, 1970)
– First to release a film version of the novel Solaris (the George Clooney version was not released until 2002)

So there’s that.

One additional thing to note is that the Soviet’s were extremely cautious with their own Luna program, fearing that sending a man to the Moon would lead to a hazardous Solar Radiation Event.

This caution is atypical, as one reason the Soviets were the first to achieve the milestones noted above is that they often threw caution to the wind. The thinking with the ill-fated Luna 2 probe, the first to ever ‘land’ on the Moon was that “hey, crashing counts as landing!!”